Heaven and Hell # 353
353. By false intelligence and wisdom we mean any intelligence and wisdom that is devoid of acknowledgment of the Divine. In fact, people who do not acknowledge the Divine Being but put nature in place of the Divine all think on the basis of their physical bodies. They are merely sense-centered, no matter how scholarly and learned they are considered in this world. 1 Their learning, though, does not rise any higher than the things in front of their eyes in this world, things that they keep in their memory and inspect almost physically. This is the case even though the very same branches of knowledge serve truly intelligent people as a means of forming their understanding. By "branches of knowledge" we mean the various experimental disciplines such as physics, astronomy, chemistry, mechanics, geometry, anatomy, psychology, philosophy, and political history, as well as the realms of literature and criticism and language study.
[2] There are church dignitaries who deny the Divine. They do not raise their thoughts any higher than the sensory concerns of the outer person. They look on the contents of the Word as no different from knowledge about anything else; they do not treat those contents as subjects of thought or of any thorough consideration by an enlightened rational mind. This is because their own deeper levels are closed off, and along with them, the more outward levels that are next to these deeper ones. The reason they are closed is that they have turned their backs on heaven and reversed the things that they could see there, things that are proper to the deeper levels of the human mind, as we have noted before. This is why they cannot see what is true and good - because these matters are in darkness for them, while what is false and evil is in the light.
[3] Nevertheless, sense-centered people can think logically, some of them actually with more skill and penetration than other people. However, they rely on deceptive sensory appearances bolstered by their own learning, and since they can think logically in this fashion, they think they are wiser than other people. 2 The fire that fuels their reasoning is the fire of love for themselves and the world.
These are the people who are devoted to false intelligence and wisdom, the ones meant by the Lord in Matthew: "Seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand" (Matthew 13:13-15); and again, "Things are hidden from the intelligent and wise and revealed to children" (Matthew 11:25-26).
Poznámky pod čarou:
1. [Swedenborg's footnote] The sensory level is the outmost level of our life, attached to and embedded in our bodies: 5077, 5767, 9212, 9216, 9331, 9730. We call people sense-centered if they evaluate and decide about everything on the basis of their physical senses and do not believe anything unless they see it with their eyes and touch it with their hands: 5094, 7693. People like this do their thinking in their most external minds, and not more inwardly within themselves: 5089, 5094, 6564, 7693. Their deeper levels are closed, so that they can see nothing of divine truth: 6564, 6844-6845. In short, they are in a crude natural illumination and can see nothing that comes from heaven's light: 6201, 6310, 6564, 6844-6845, 6598, 6612, 6614, 6622, 6624. So they are profoundly opposed to whatever involves heaven and the church: 6201, 6316 [6310?], 6844-6845, 6948-6949. Scholars who have convinced themselves in opposition to the truths of the church are sense-centered: 6316. A description of the nature of sense-centered people: 10236.
2. [Swedenborg's footnote] The logical thinking of sense-centered people is both keen and skillful because they place all intelligence in talking from their physical memory: 195-196, 5700, 10236. However, all this relies on deceptive sensory appearances: 5084, 6948-6949, 7693. Sense-centered people are more canny and vicious than others: 7693, 10236. The ancients called people like this "serpents of the tree of knowledge": 195-197, 6398, 6949, 10313.
Arcana Coelestia # 6622
6622. In talking to spirits about what flows into ideas constituting thought I have said that men cannot by any means believe how countless the details are that an idea holds within it, for men have no conception of thought except as something simple and singular. Thus their judgement of the matter is based on quite external evidence. The spirits to whom I was talking at that time subscribed to the belief that ideas did not have anything inwardly present in them, a belief of which they had become convinced during their lifetime. But to enable them to understand that they perceived countless things as a single whole, I was led to tell them that the movements of millions of motor fibres combine to produce a single action. At the same time all things in the body work together and adjust themselves both collectively and individually to produce that action. Yet for all this that small action is seen as one that is simple and singular, as though it possessed no such complexity. It is similar with the countless things which combine to produce a single spoken word, such as the bending of the lips, and of all the muscles and fibres there; also the movements of the tongue, throat, larynx, trachea, lungs, and diaphragm, together with all their muscles collectively and individually. Since a person discerns the single utterance they make merely as a simple sound without anything more to it, one may see how crude is perception that relies on the senses. What then of perception that relies on sensory evidence regarding ideas constituting thought which exist in a purer world and are accordingly quite remote from the sensory level?
